Honoring National Poetry Month the lazy way

It’s been in the back of my mind since April Fool’s Day that it might be neat to do a National Poetry Month tribute, even though the course of my writing has veered well away from poetry in recent years. I certainly wasn’t going to create anything new for it.

But this weekend I remembered, I actually launched this incarnation of my longtime homepage in 2011 with a really elaborate poetry month tribute. Operating under the theory that it’s become old enough to be new again, I present thirteen poems from my 2008 collection The Journey to Kailash, with illustrations, detailed explanatory notes and even audio of me reciting each poem (you’ll have to activate Flash plug-ins to listen to those). And below the links to the main show I’ve included a bonus, my concrete poem “Phase Shift” from which this blog gets its name. Originally published in Tales of the Unanticipated in 1997, “Phase Shift” appears in my collection Hungry Constellations, but this stunning visualization by artist Bob Freeman appears nowhere else but here.